Questions[acronis](server)

I have a 5TB volume (non-bootable) on a Windows Server 2008 box. I need to copy it to another server over the network. Because the volume has 30 million files, filesystem copy tools like robocopy will take forever; I need a block-level copy. The source volume has to stay online during the copy -- so booting to Linux is not an option.

Acronis has to go from old volume -> image -> new volume.

What will let me go old volume -> new volume, without the image step in the middle?

I need to back up a single server (Windows 2008 R2) onto an external drive. Because the server has millions of small files, block-level backup, not filesystem, is a requirement.

I can use Acronis Backup & Recovery, or Windows Server Backup. Is there any compelling reason to pick one over the other? (I already own the Acronis software, so price is not an issue.)

Is there any particular backup / imaging software which seems to be a good fit for our situation, or is there some other direction I should be looking in to meet our requirements? I realize this is a strangely-written question. Please comment if there are specifics that would help answer.

To give the necessary background information: we are a VAR looking to engineer a reasonably reliable backup strategy for our customers. Each of our customers has this environment:

• One workstation-class computer running Windows XP or 7
• Two semi-dumb terminals running Windows XP Embedded (not very powerful machines, but each plays a unique role so they aren't interchangeable)
• All machines are networked together

We want to accomplish the following goals:

• If any one of the machines goes down, new hardware can be plugged into the network and remotely imaged with the HDD contents of the machine the night before it crashed.
• We can recover from a crash of either a terminal or of the workstation.
• Backups are hosted at the customer's location, not across the Internet somewhere
• Configuring the backup tasks and running restore tasks should be scriptable. The restoration tasks should be able to be performed by a telephone helpdesk technician with as little training as possible. In my mind, this means scripting it so it's as simple as double-clicking a script.

We have previously used Acronis True Image 9 with the strategy of imaging each machine nightly and storing the data on a second hard drive attached to the workstation, but we found the following challenges:

• Creating the backup tasks on each computer is tedious and error prone, and Acronis does not provide any scripting mechanism that allows creating a scheduled backup job.
• If the workstation needs to be recovered, the customer must be blindly walked through using bootable media to start the recovery.

I've been looking into using Acronis 10 or Backup Exec, but those systems appear to be even more complicated to set up and as far as I can tell also do not provide any reasonable scripting interfaces.

I would like to have an disk image backup of Exchange, before doing some significant upgrades and expanding a too-small C-Drive. Can I use something like Acronis Backup & Recover 10 Server (price on 11/11/2010 $860) and not use Acronis Backup for Exchange which is like 50% more expensive? Or is there a better alternative to get a disk image backup?

hoping someone can advise on my problem, I am running Hyper-V core and trying to create my first VM for testing purposes. Using Acronis True Image echo server with UR I converted a Seerver 2000 tib to VHD. I then copied this across to the Hyper-V local drive and created a new VM pointing the hard drive to the vhd image.

When I boot this up all I get is "Boot failure. Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot media in selected Boot device". The original server had SCSI disks, the Hyper-V server doesn't, but I have ensured that it boots from an IDE disk and that it is in fact booting from that not the CD.

I can only imagine this is caused by the SCSI disks on VHD but cannot for the life of me work out how to fix, I have several of these I need to do so starting to worry now!

I can confirm that when I did this from tib to vmdk it worked first time using VMware on a laptop.

Any help very much appreciated.

Gary